Doctors in
London took the hand off and sent it to France to be made into pâté.
Just kidding. Actually they sent it there to be examined. After they
spent the day running around the hospital asking everyone if they
“need a hand”, of course.

Some
people are really ungrateful. Like children, for instance. At least
that’s what every parent says who ever had one that didn’t thank
them profusely for “all the things we’ve done and sacrificed for
you.” Which is pretty much all of them. Hormel and Libby are
ungrateful. They should be thanking everyone involved in
“Hannibal” at least once an hour for making luncheon
meat—whatever that is—suddenly seem like gourmet dining, but
they’re not. And George W. Bush is very ungrateful. Instead of
persecuting—I mean, investigating—Clinton for pardoning Marc
Rich he should be thanking the man profusely for handing him the
election on silver kneepads.

But the biggest ingrate
alive may be Clint Hallam, the man who received the world’s first
hand transplant in 1998 and recently decided to give it back.
Hopefully not to whoever gave it to him in the first place.

He’s not saying why he
had it removed, but doctors say it wasn’t being rejected. I feel
certain it didn’t take on a life of its own like the one in “The
Hand” or we would have read about it in the Enquirer. There
is, of course, the possibility that he saw “Hook” and was
inspired to make a fashion statement, but that’s farfetched since
it would have been much, much easier to pick up some moustache wax,
a pirate hat, and some of Adam Ant’s old shirts and call it a day.

It’s gotten
so bad that Belgium closed down two zoos and Dublin cancelled their
St. Patrick’s Day parade just to make sure the marching animals
wouldn’t spread the disease—the ovine ones, not the hard
drinking Irish ones. What next, a haggis quarantine?

Whatever the reason, doctors in London took the hand off and sent it
to France to be made into pâté.
Just kidding. Actually they sent it there to be examined. After they
spent the day running around the hospital asking everyone if they
“need a hand”, of course. Hey, even doctors like a good joke,
especially since there are only so many times you can pull the
“Doctor, it hurts when I do this” gag without the benefit of a
Demerol I.V. drip and still get a laugh.

Why they had to send it to
France is a mystery. When Charles I, Henry VIII, and Sir Walter
Raleigh were beheaded you didn’t see anyone shipping the spare
parts out of the country, even though you know they were dying to do
it just so they could pin a note on it that said, “We always told
Charlie he should have his head examined.” Like doctors,
executioners never get tired of hearing the same old jokes.

What’s even odder is that
the hand got across the border, since everyone in Europe is scared
to death of foot-and-mouth disease right now. That’s right,
foot-and-mouth disease has knocked mad cow disease out of the number
one spot on Europe’s Top 10 Medical Scare Chart after an
unprecedented three-year run. It’s gotten so bad that Belgium
closed down two zoos and Dublin cancelled their St. Patrick’s Day
parade just to make sure the marching animals wouldn’t spread the
disease—the ovine ones, not the hard drinking Irish ones. What
next, a haggis quarantine?

Even though you can’t
ship a filet mignon from one country to the next, apparently it’s
okay to wrap up a spare hand, slap a few stamps on the package, and
drop it in the nearest mail box. I’m sure this will end too if the
disease mutates into hand-to-mouth disease, which to date is mostly
a problem among those on the dole in England but could easily spread
should the global economy enter a new Ice Age.

The question is, will these English doctors feel the
same urge to send any parts they remove to France like they did
Hallam’s hand? And will the French men be more grateful than
Hallam or will they have patient’s remorse and want the parts
reattached later?

It’s interesting that France would even want Hallam’s
hand, since they usually don’t want anything to do with the
English. That’s why you won’t find an English muffin in Paris,
they’ve been known to throw stale baguettes at any tennis player
who puts English on the ball, and they routinely spit on the floor
if they get stuck taking a British Airways flight. Well, that and
the fact that they think it’s an American owned airline.

It would have been
easier—and saved postage—had Hallam had his hand removed in
France, but that may not be legal. According to the Napoleonic Code,
self-mutilation is a crime. Thus public hospitals in France won’t
perform circumcisions and almost no one will perform a vasectomy.
Except, of course, a wife who catches her husband cheating before he
catches her. Even if they would perform it, what man in his right
mind—which for the sake of this discussion shall benevolently
include French ones—wants a doctor getting near his private parts
knowing he’s been drinking wine with lunch. And breakfast. And his
mid-morning snack.

To get around this—the
inability to get a vasectomy, not the French passion for drinking
wine—a British sexual health charity called Marie Stopes
International (motto: “Stopes, in the name of love”) has set up
vasectomy clinics in London and Ashford. They did this to make it
easy for the unclipped French, since both of these cities are
regular stops on the Eurostar run. Thus, you can expect the railway
to start using a new advertising slogan any day now: “Eurostar, a
cut below the rest.”

The question is, will these
English doctors feel the same urge to send any parts they remove to
France like they did Hallam’s hand? And will the French men be
more grateful than Hallam or will they have patient’s remorse and
want the parts reattached later? It’s questions like these that
keep medical ethicists awake at night. Well, that and the vague
ingredient list on the label of the luncheon meat they ate today.